This Watery Place

This book will be recognized as one of the major interventions of the decade Sophie Lewis, author ofAbolish the FamilyAn astonishing achievement written with the propulsiveness of a novel and the diagnostic precision of the best historical materialist analysis Jordy Rosenberg, author ofConfessions of the FoxA fierce and luminous revelation Anne Boyer, poet and author ofThe UndyingWhat does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two while public discussion of reproductive healthcare centers around the viability line: the fantasized moment when a fetus could feasibly be extracted from a uterus? What happens to the psychology of parents who spend years scrolling through photographs of children crushed in war while babies sleep beside them, indistinguishable from the dead children in expression and bodily habit?Emma Heaney addresses these questions, situated between the particular historical moments of her pregnancies and the transhistorical continuities of sensations, emotions, socialities, and conceptual provocations that have long accompanied gestation. She focuses on the embodied realities that are mystified in the sentimentalization of motherhood, a political process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labor of gestation and care, as well as of children. As a result, gestation is revealed as a process against cisness, wage work, and the death cult of war.Emma Heaney is a teacher and writer living in Queens, New York City, with her two children. She is the author ofThe New Womanand the editor of the collectionFeminism Against Cisness.